Friday, January 24, 2020

New Jersey Bars Police From Using Clearview Facial Recognition App


By BY KASHMIR HILL from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/3aI4lBF

Wikipedia article of the day for January 25, 2020

The Wikipedia article of the day for January 25, 2020 is Æthelbald, King of Wessex.
Æthelbald, King of Wessex (died 860) was the second of five sons of King Æthelwulf of Wessex. Æthelbald's elder brother Æthelstan defeated the Vikings in 850 in the first recorded sea battle in English history, and probably died in the early 850s. The next year Æthelwulf and Æthelbald inflicted another defeat on the Vikings at the Battle of Aclea. In 855 Æthelwulf went on pilgrimage to Rome and appointed Æthelbald king of Wessex, while Æthelberht, the next oldest son, became king of Kent, which had been conquered by Wessex thirty years earlier. Æthelbald refused to give up his throne when his father returned to England in 856, and continued as king either of west Wessex or the whole territory until his father died in 858. Æthelbald then married his father's widow, Judith, a great-granddaughter of Charlemagne, to the scandal of later monastic chroniclers, and ruled Wessex until his own death. Æthelberht now re-united Wessex and Kent under his sole rule and they were never again divided.

Have a Search Warrant for Data? Google Wants You to Pay


By BY GABRIEL J.X. DANCE AND JENNIFER VALENTINO-DEVRIES from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/2GltDHJ

The Week in Tech: A Tech Mogul’s Phone and the Saudi Crown Prince


By BY DAVEY ALBA from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/38F5qIG

Thursday, January 23, 2020

Wikipedia article of the day for January 24, 2020

The Wikipedia article of the day for January 24, 2020 is Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts.
The decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts was accomplished in the early nineteenth century by several European scholars, especially Jean-François Champollion (pictured) and Thomas Young. Egyptian writing, which included the hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts, ceased to be understood in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. Afterwards, it was believed that Egyptian scripts were exclusively ideographic, representing ideas, rather than phonetic, representing sounds. The Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799, bore a parallel text in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek, but deciphering the Egyptian text through its Greek translation proved difficult. Young, building on the work of Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and Johan David Åkerblad, identified several phonetic signs in demotic. In the early 1820s Champollion realised the hieroglyphic script had both phonetic and ideographic elements. He identified the meanings of most phonetic hieroglyphs and established much of the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Egyptian.

Jeff Bezos, Tabloid Man


By BY KAREN WEISE from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/2RGruLY

When the Tech Backlash Turns Dangerous: Fake Calls for a SWAT Team


By BY SHEERA FRENKEL from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/2NTniHB